Atrios writes…

It’ll be interesting and, more often than not, frustrating to watch as the new reality takes hold in Washington. The Village conventional wisdom has been stuck in 1984 for 25 years now, and obviously things have changed. The media have been taking their cues from Republicans for so long it’s difficult to see how that will change quickly. But things have changed.

I was watching some of the TV news coverage of the inauguration last night…I haven’t watched TV news in ages its been so pathetically worthless…and I was struck by how many of the gas bags on my screen were actually older then me.  Then I remembered that I am not young either.  So why did they look so damn old?

If the Village Conventional Wisdom has been stuck in 1984, I’ve been stuck in 1976 for 32 years now.  That is…I keep thinking of myself as young when logically and rationally I know I’m not and haven’t been for quite a while.  I look in the bathroom mirror every morning and dang if I don’t see a 55 year old man staring back at me.  But I know I’m that and when I see myself in a mirror, or in a photograph, it doesn’t bother me.  But sitting on the couch watching tv (or for that matter banging on a keyboard as I am right now) somehow I just snap back into that mental self image I had back when I was a kid.

So I have no gut level apprehensions at the passing of the generational torch that I’m seeing now in some of the talking heads.  As far as the inner me is concerned, this is the moment I’ve been waiting for all my life: when what Howard Cruse once called Kennedy Time picks back up where it left off.  I’ve been waiting out Nixon Time now for so long I’d almost forgotten how it felt to be living in an America that had a bright and promising future in front of it.  I’ve no idea if Obama is going to be the kind of president Kennedy was…in point of fact I was too young during Kennedy’s all too brief administration to really grasp what was going on in the world politically.  All I knew was after being a kid in a world where the communists were lurking in all the shadows, suddenly there was nothing to be afraid of anymore.  There was a future ahead of us, and it was going to be a great adventure after all, and not something to fear.  If Kennedy hadn’t been assassinated, I wonder if the counter-culture that came later in the decade would have pushed back as hard at that era’s Wise Old Men.  Johnson was no Kennedy.  We all felt betrayed.

There is something in the air today, very much like the feeling I had back in "Kennedy Time".  Yes, there are dangers ahead, yes there are hard times facing us, but we will meet them and rise above.  We can do it.  Liberty and Justice for All can win over totalitarianism and greed and hate.  America can walk with the rest of the world into a brighter tomorrow.  We can do it.  I’m writing here about the sense of mind and spirit you feel now, not necessarily the reality on the ground.  The next few years are not going to be a cakewalk obviously.  For one thing all the apparatus of the Nixon/Reagan right are still there.  Rush Limbaugh and all the other hate jockeys will still be pumping venom into hearts and minds, although hopefully to smaller and smaller audiences.  Right wing billionaires like Howard Ahmanson will still be destabilizing our democracy with their wealth like heroin and meth pushers destroy neighborhoods.  The enemies of democracy around the world will hate us all the more for living up to our ideals then they did while Bush and Cheney were busy pissing on them and laughing.  But America is dreaming a better dream now, then the tired and fearful conceits of the Wise Old Men. 

So there I am on the sofa, watching the talking heads on TV trying to wrap their minds around this new president and this new reality and suddenly they all just look old and tired and I have to remind myself that they’re not that much older then me some of them.  And I am struck by this fact.  The entire time Bush sat like a turd in the White House and I was hating, absolutely loathing the Washington news media, The Villagers, for kissing up to him, I never really noticed how old The Villagers were.  I saw it in their faces today.  But mostly, in their smiling bewilderment.  And I remembered how Kennedy had begun, by declaring that the torch had been passed.

We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans-born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage-and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.
–John F. Kennedy – inaugural address, Friday, January 20, 1961

There’s going to be a lot of ink written about how Obama represents the passing of the tired old boomer generation.  But many of us boomers didn’t get old and tired and never let go of our dream of a better world, a just and peaceful world.  We were outflanked by the Nixonites, who simply dug in their heels and kept on fighting after Nixon resigned.  We thought the struggle was over then and it wasn’t, it was only just beginning.  Cheney and Rumfeld, who were both in the Nixon administration, and much of their gang were born either before or during the second world war.  Villagers like David S. Broder were born well before it.  If my generation is guilty of anything, it’s living too much in our dreams and not enough in the world to make them real.  I’m told that there is a saying among Jews, that when you pray you should pray as though everything depends on God, but when you act you should act as though everything depends on you.  We should treat our dreams like that.  Dream as though dreams come true.  Act as though dreams are not enough.  And never underestimate how much the darkness hates the dreamer.

One thing that struck me about Obama early in the primaries, was how good he was at taking the measure of his opposition, how decent he remained in the heat of the fight and how relentlessly focused he was on the process and the outcome.  He took the Clinton camp completely by surprise, and walked right on by them, so certain were they that their candidate was inevitable.  There’s the difference between the generations.  There’s why Obama was the better person for the job…the necessary person for the job.  Nothing is inevitable.  If the torch has now been passed to a new generation who revere the dream of liberty and justice for all, but are wise to its enemies, starry-eyed and street-smart, then we will get to the promise land.

[Edited a tad…]